"I'm terrified of babies," the singer, 24, says in a new interview with Rolling Stone. "I think, creatively, as a woman, you change once you give birth," she explains. "I'm totally not ready for that."

And the flamboyant star (real name: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta) isn't spending too much time between the sheets lately, either. "Sex is certainly not, like a priority at the moment," she quips in her cover story.

But Gaga admits that one particular lover — a heavy metal drummer whom she dated just before stardom — had a huge impact.

"I wouldn't have been as successful without him," she admits of their tempestuous, heartbreaking time together. "I've really never loved anyone like I loved him. Or like I love him. That relationship really shaped me…I sort of resolved that if you can't have the guy of your dreams, there are other ways to give love."

The "Bad Romance" chanteuse also hints at a much deeper trauma in her past, but demurs on specifics. "You have to be careful about how much you reveal to people who l look up to you so much," she says. "I don't want to be a bad example. I'm not a victim."

Instead, she says vaguely: "There are some things that are so traumatic, I don't even fully remember them. But I will say wholeheartedly that I had the most wonderful mother and father. I was never abused. I didn't have a bad childhood. All of the things I went through were on my own quest for an artistic journey to f— myself up like [Andy] Warhol and [David] Bowie and Mick [Jagger]."

But all that squalor and self-destruction is now in the past, she insists. "It petrifies me," she recalls of her hardscrabble days. "When I think about laying in my apartment [in New York] with bug bites from bedbugs and roaches on the floor and no will or interest in doing anything but making music and getting high. So I guess I've come a really long way, and I have my friends to thank for that, and I have God."